7 Awesome Things the World Is Running Out of

7Chocolate

Love Chocolate? Yeah, we thought so. Do you know where chocolate comes from? Yeah, we didn't think so. Most of the world's coco supply comes from West Africa where child labor laws are non existent. Farming coco is extremely difficult and would likely not be done as much if it weren't for child laborers. So how much are they being paid? Less than a dollar per day.

Child labor laws are slowly getting closer and closer to becoming law and changing the industry forever. Prices are bound to rise, and some say the price of chocolate could soon be similar to that of caviar. Plus, it's not like other parts of the world can pick up the slack. Chocolate can only be grown in latitudes within 10 degrees of the equator—an area that's home to some of the most unstable countries on the planet. In other words, best not skip out on trick-or-treating next year; fifty years down the line, that candy haul could payoff big time. [Gizmodo]

6Sardines

This one might not be as upsetting for some of you, but for lovers of the oily little sidefish, Armageddon is just around the corner. Just this past month, Western Canada's fleet of sardine-hunting ships came back with a return of... zilch. Not only is that $32 million worth of potential sardines down the drain, but the loss is indicative of a much more disturbing future: We could be in store for decades worth of sardine-free waters.

Sardine populations have a tendency to fluctuate with water temperature, and these tiny fish have been reproducing less ever since Pacific waters cooled back in the 1990s. Heavy fishing, of course, kept trudging on regardless. What's more, any sardine eggs we're getting these days are coming from fish born a decade ago—a sardine generation that's just about dead. Despite all this, Canada is still upping its sardine quotas and the US, though it does limit catches, still hasn't cut down enough to sustain the dwindling stock.

So what does this mean for people with a predilection for the canned swimmers? It could be decades before the water warms up enough to welcome back our salty friends of the sea. [Gizmodo]